Sega Sammy Reports Net Profit for Q1 FY2011

But Game Sales Weak; Consumer Business Reports Loss

Financial results are in for Sega Sammy Holdings, and for the first quarter of FY2011, the company does what Nintendon’t: Earn a profit.

The company in whole earned about ¥7.04 billion for the quarter, or more than $81 million in US dollars.  Once again, Sega Sammy’s Pachinko and Pachislot division had the most brisk sales and earned the most money.

That said, the company’s consumer business section, which includes home video game software, had robust sales of ¥20.7 billion for the quarter, or over $239 million.  But for all those sales, the division lost money, reporting a quarterly operating loss of over $6.9 million.  Sega Sammy is now predicting this division to lose even more in the 2nd quarter, to the tune of almost $29 million.

Worldwide, Sega did well nearly 3.3 million pieces of software for the quarter.  Much of that, 1.68 million or about 51%, came from sales in the United States.  “Catalogue,” or older releases, accounted for over 39% of total Q1 software sales, while new titles on the PS3 were the runner up with 590,000 units sold.  XBOX 360 titles followed, with the Nintendo DS, Wii, PSP, and PC rounding out the sales division, in that order.

Though it was largely panned by the gaming press, the combined multiplatform sales of Iron Man 2 sold more than 1.1 million copies, the company disclosed in its earnings statement.  Alpha Protocol sold 700,000 copies in the quarter.

For the second quarter, Sega Sammy has revised software sales estimates down.  The company now believes just 5 million copies will be sold, off from initial estimates of over 6.3 million.

Of note in the earnings report is Sega’s commitment to “adapt” to mobile and social media gaming platforms:

In the home video game software industry, the demand was generally weak in the U.S. and European markets due to the headwind like sluggish personal consumption. The Group needs to adapt to changing business environment in which the market demand for new content geared to social networking service (SNS) and smartphone is expanding.

Sega stock on Wall Street is up marginally at the time of this article’s publication on this news.  We’ll let you know of final results once the trading day ends.